Bahramov's Personal Blog » SQL Server

T-SQL: Find logical name and physical location of system databases

Zaur Bahramov — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:01:04 +0000

The following T-SQL statements will print the logical name and physical location of system database files:

USE master;
GO
SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'master')

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'tempdb')

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'model')

SELECT name, physical_name AS CurrentLocation, state_desc
FROM sys.master_files
WHERE database_id = DB_ID(N'msdb')

Result:

SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 Released

Zaur Bahramov — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 09:52:37 +0000

Today Microsoft Released Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008

Some of the changes include:

SQL Server 2008 SP1 has made it easier and more efficient to deploy and manage service packs. By adding the ability to Slipstream, SQL Server 2008 and SP1 can be installed simultaneously. This decreases the total time for an installation, including a fewer number of reboots.
Service Pack Uninstall allows administrators to uninstall the service pack separately from the database release.
Report Builder 2.0 Click-Once deployment. Up till now, Report Builder 2.0 was only available as a separate install on the client machines. Now .NET’s Click-Once technology is used so that users can run Report Builder without having to install it first through a setup file locally.
In addition to the a roll-up of previous cumulative updates, SP1 includes quick fix engineering updates and minor fixes in response to requests reported through the SQL Server community. There are no new feature updates in this service pack.

SQL Server 2008 SP1 has in total 300 fixes included, with the majority being minor tweaks. If you compare this to the SQL Server 2005 SP1, which contained 2’500 fixes, you really see that SQL Server 2008 is a very stable release.

Download information:

Microsoft SQL Server Service Pack 1 (build 10.00.2531)
Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Express Edition Service Pack 1 (build 10.00.2531)
List of the bugs that are fixed in SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1

Creating a compressed SQL Server Database backup

Zaur Bahramov — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:23:25 +0000

In this post I will describe how to create a compressed backup of any SQL Server database in Windows. This is especially useful if you have Express or MSDE edition of SQL Server where there’s no SQL Agent. Let’s look a this example:

First we will create a folder, where we want to keep or database backups. Let’s call it C:\DbBackup.
Now, we’ll create a sql script that will backup our database. I will use Northwind database in this example. The created backup file will have the name Northwind_[current date]. bak Open a Notepad and paste the following T-SQL code:

-- Create backup of NorthWind Database
-- add current date to the file name and
-- save it inside C:\DbBackup folder
--
DECLARE @str NVARCHAR(255)
SET @str=N'C:\DbBackup\Northwind_'+CONVERT(VARCHAR, GETDATE(), 105)+'.bak'
BACKUP DATABASE Northwind TO DISK=@str

Save file as NorthwindBackup.sql

Another thing that we want to do is to compress the backup file so that it takes less space on our hard drive. There’re many software out there both commercial, like WinRAR, WinZIP and free – 7-Zip. Also, you can use the COMPRESS.EXE utility from Windows NT/2000/ZP/2003 Resource Kit available for download from Microsoft site, to create a compressed archive. In this post I will show how to create archive with Compress.exe and Rar.exe utilities.

Create a new text file and write the following code [if using Compress.exe]:

sqlcmd -E -i NorthwindBackup.sql -o Result.txt
compress.exe -Z -R NorthWind_*.bak NorthWind_*.zip
ren *.ba_ *.zip del *.bak *.zi_

Save the file as NorthWindBackup.bat in C:\DbBackup.

Create a new text file and write the following code [if using rar.exe]:

sqlcmd -E -i NorthwindBackup.sql -o Result.txt
rar.exe a -df -inul -ag[dd_mm_yyyy] C:\DbBackup\NorthWind.rar C:\DbBackup\*.bak

Save the file as NorthWindBackup.bat in C:\DbBackup.

When you run the NorthWindBackup.bat file it will first pass the NorthWindBackup.sql script to ‘sqlcmd.exe’. sqlcmd.exe- is a command line utility of Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 and is available in all versions. If you are using a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 then you will have to use osql.exe instead of sqlcmd.exe. The usage syntax of these utilities is very similar and you can read more about their usage in BOL (sqlcmd syntax and osql syntax). In my example utility starts with the default SQL Server parameters and the result is written to Result.txt. After that the backup file is compressed and the uncompressed backup file is deleted.

Further, you will need to create a Scheduled Task that will execute the NorthWindBackup.bat at certain time. For this reason you may use the Windows Scheduled Task from visual interface or create a task directly from the command line interface of Schtasks.exe utility.

Here’s a command that will create a Scheduled Task to be run every day at 8:00 PM from Local System account:

schtasks /create /tn "NorthWindBackup" /tr c:\DbBackup\NorthWindBackupR.bat /sc daily /st 20:00:00 /ed 12/12/2010 /ru "NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM"

Sample files can be downloaded here:

SQL Web Assistant: Could not open the output file.

Zaur Bahramov — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:03:53 +0000

Error Message:
Msg 16821, Level 11, State 1, Procedure sp_makewebtask, Line 131 SQL Web Assistant: Could not open the output file. ____________________________ Script completed with errors

Description:
This error message appears when you try to call the procedure sp_makewebtask but the output file cannot be opened.

Consequences:
The T-SQL statement can be parsed, but causes the error at runtime.

Resolution:
Errors of the Severity Level 11 are generated by the user and are corrigible by the user. The statement cannot be executed this way. You must specify a valid and accessible path. Also you have to make sure that the Service Logon account for SQL Server has appropriate rights to write to the specified location.

Versions:
All versions of SQL Server.

Example(s):

-- In this example we try to call the sp_makewebtask procedure
-- to output the result to a file on drive A:\. As our machine
-- does not have such a drive, the error is raised.

EXEC sp_makewebtask 'A:\test.html','SELECT * FROM Northwind.dbo.Orders'

Remarks:

How to change the SQL Server or SQL Server Agent service account without using SQL Enterprise Manager in SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server Configuration Manager in SQL Server 2005: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283811